Murray outfoxes The Dog for Brisbane title

Great to see Andy battle to lift the title after initial struggles against Kukushkin and Muller. Much more assured performances against Baggy and Tomic. It was a shame that Dolgo wasn't 100% but Andy went out there and did a job with a minimum of fuss.

That's all we can ask of Andy...well apart from lifting the AO trophy come the 29th Jan!!

Can't criticise as I didn't get up early either. Weird that the points don't count as I thought he could choose which 250s he uses but clearly more esoteric than that!Anyway it's a great start to the year and sounds Andy did really well both on and off court. Also did a good interview with the dreaded Gary Richardson on R5L this morning . I think this link should take you to it:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/16459777.stm

I think giving Andy confidence and getting match tight playing at Brisbane more than compensates not gaining 250 points. Imagine if Andy had lost to Kukushkin..that wouldn't have been ideal so can't complain with the outcome this morning.

Yeah that's another rule that adds to the confusion of the ranking system. A "prize" for participating in four 500 events in the last 52 weeks is that a player can replace the lowest 500 score with the points from their next best countable tournament. This site explains the rules pretty well: http://mytennislounge.com/comments/index.php?shell=2846

The ATP claim that the ranking system is fine the way it is and "accessible to anyone" but that's clearly not true. I'm sure that the percentage of tennis fans who understand the ranking system is very low. We follow a lot of tennis here on Murraysworld but there's probably fewer than ten MW members who can say that they are completely confident in the way the rankings work (I'm not one of them). No sport should have rules that are this complicated and it really annoys me that these people at the ATP don't consider that fans may want to follow their favourite player's points and not leave it up to the boffins at the ATP. If I was the type to write strongly worded letters to people then the ATP would've already received a letter from me containing some pretty strong words about all this.